Audience Reports in Google Analytics

In this video tutorial, we will take a detailed look at all the audience reports in Google Analytics. Here is a video tutorial.

Video Transcription

Hey, everyone, this is Viren and welcome back to another Google Analytics tutorial. In this tutorial, we’re going to take a look at all the reports under Audiences. These reports help you understand your audience in a much more better way and make a lot of different marketing and product decision based on this.

Overview

So let’s start with the Audience Overview and as you can you see can select any timeframe. What the report will give you is an overview of the number of users, the new users, sessions, the number of sessions per user, page views, pages per session, average session duration, and bounce rate. Now if you don’t understand the meaning of any of these terms, feel free to hover over it and you will see what it is. And these are the basic terms that you should be doing while dealing with analytics.

You can see a division of the languages that speak, the country they are from, city, browser and you can get a much more detailed report on each of these parameters here under these sections.

Active Users

So let’s start with Active Users for example. Active Users will show you the number of active users on your site over one day, seven days, fourteen days or the last thirty days. And if your marketing efforts have been paying off you’ll see these numbers increasing with the duration of time.

Lifetime Value

Now, if you go into Lifetime Value. This is a fairly new report and what Google is trying to do is tell you what is the value of your customer over a period of eighty to ninety days. So here you can see it gives me a revenue per user in the first 82 days after the acquisition. So if Day 0 is when your user got acquired, over the last 82 days the revenue per user is actually increasing. So the lifetime value of your users is increasing You can change this to other options like Goal Completion. This is for the goals that you set up. We’ll get into another video where I’ll teach you how to set up goals.

Cohort Analysis

If you get into the Cohort Analysis. Here what Google is trying to show you is that if a user came on to your site on 14th May, which is Day 0, 100{999a6ee92a729678b83958955ff512615ffcece181c47af1c4b9f3eba8796858} of your users, how many of them came back to your site on day one or day two and day three. So you can just analyze that part of the traffic that came on May 14th and say if you are running a campaign on May 16th, you can see if that campaign gave you users who kept coming back to your site and over time your goal has to be to make sure that more and more users keep coming back to your website throughout the week.

User Explorer

Let’s get into User Explorer. This is something that I have rarely used. It’ll show you users on your site by Client ID. Client ID is basically an ID that Google gives to each device with which your website is accessed. So from this device, there’s been 19 sessions created in this selected time range.

Demographics

Let’s get into Demographics and here you’ll get an overview of the age and gender of your audience. You can get into detailed reports as well where if you go under Age, it will show you the age group of your users.

Interests

Interests are something very unique and nice, where you can get an overview of what are the topics in general that your audience is interested in. This really helps you create a lot of marketing campaigns or if you see that your users are interested a lot in Consumer Electronics or Mobile Phones, then you can create more content around that. So there are other categories you can go to. What are their Affinity Categories? And you’ll get a list of a lot of categories. So this really helps in creating the content strategy for the website.

Geo

Geo, will again give you language and location of your users. These are the languages, these are the locations of your user.

Behavior

If you get into Behavior. You can check New vs Returning users. So for the selected time frame, what percentage of users are new and what percentage are returning.

Let’s get into Frequency & Recency. So this will show you that in the selected time frame, the number of users who had just one session on your site to the number of users who had more than one sessions. And the will give you an idea of what part of your audience keeps coming back to your site.

Engagement will show you the session duration of your users. How many of them stick around on your website for a longer period of time compared to the ones who leave in duration 0-10 seconds.

And the Session Quality also helps you determine the same, but here you can you can categorize it by different channels and see how each channel is performing.

Technology

Technology will give you an overview of Browser & OS. Now this is something that developers use a lot and as product managers you need to see this a lot and say you check what browsers users use your website on and if one of the browsers is Safari and you haven’t really optimized your website for this and you have a lot of sessions coming in from Safari you need to start optimizing your website.

Mobile

You can also check what Devices your users use and make sure that you have tested your devices. so if Apple iPhone is the most used device to access your website you need to make sure you’ve tested it rigorously with an Apple iPhone.

Custom

Custom Variables is something extremely interesting. This is not set up for this account here but I’ll just give you an overview of what this means. So for example, if you were running a travel website and you wanted to create a custom variable to allot to each of your users which are not Geo, or Technology or mobile. For example, I want to know how users who want to travel to Brazil, a user who wants to travel it to say, Africa, respond to my website. So this is something that your developer will have to do and as soon as someone searches on your website, for example, say, for Spain, they tag the user as Spain and then it will start showing here and you can see there all the users who search for Spain or who search for India, how they are responding to your website and it’s content.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is again something very interesting. So what this tries to accomplish is say for example again your industry vertical is travel and you’re working in India and you can select daily sessions, the number of sessions you receive on a daily basis. It’ll give you an industrial overview of all the other Google Analytics accounts, maybe of your competitors, those who have the same industry selected and work in the same region. It will give you an idea of an overall industry trend as to sessions coming from social is decreasing in the industry while the new sections is increasing. So this will give you an idea around that.

You can do the same for other things like location, devices, user flow etc.

That’s it for the audience reports. If I have missed out anything please leave a comment or get in touch with me and I’ll be happy to help you out.